SUCH was the impact of this Sir Thomas Allen production of Rossini’s all time favourite that it is scarcely believable that it was four years ago that it came to Inverness.

The main thing that struck the mind first time around was that Sir Thomas had brought a lifetime on the operatic stage to his production with little details that carpetbaggers would not even have thought about.

Cast of Scottish Opera's revival of The Barber of Seville

For this revival, still produced by Sir Thomas, most of these little snippets were still there, and a few new ones besides. Simon Higlett’s set is incredibly complicated, but such is the amount of work that has gone into the show that all went off without a hitch – at least if there was a hitch, it wasn’t apparent to the audience which packed the Empire Theatre to the gods for both performances.

The Barber of Seville is essentially a comic opera about money; how it brings greed out in people, how it can oil the wheels of life and how it can overcome people’s loyalties. It is based on the first of the Figaro trilogy by Pierre Beaumarchais that so scandalised the Parisian censors while at the same time enjoying many private performances. The three plays illustrate the relationships between the aristocracy and the people before, during and after the period of the French Revolution.

The scene is set during the overture as the street in Seville wakes up. Count Almaviva (Thomas Walker), Spain’s most eligible bachelor has followed Rosina (Claire Booth) and Dr Bartolo (Tiziano Bracci) whose ward she is, from Madrid. He serenades Rosina with the help of a street band arranged by the café owner, Fiorello (Adam Miller) but gets no response. Rosina is unable to react and that is as far as things go as Bartolo is so suspicious of everything she does. He is afraid to lose her and her fortune to another. In fact he is going to marry her himself that very day.

Figaro (Ville Rusanen) enters, with the first of the show-stoppers, the ‘Largo al Factotum’, probably the best know aria in all opera, and performed brilliantly. He and Almaviva recognise each other (in fact they had first appeared together in an earlier Beaumarchais play, Le Sacristain). Almaviva serenades Rosina again, but this time as a penniless student called Lindoro, and she responds by dropping a note to him from her balcony. And so another plot has to be hatched to get “Lindoro” into Bartolo’s house. He will go disguised as a drunken soldier with a billeting order from the regiment that has just arrived in Seville.

The genius of Simon Higlett’s set is now revealed as the street scene disappears to reveal the interior of Bartolo’s house, still in a state of chaos following his move from Madrid. Again the little details are legion; the broken plasterwork, the dodgy electrics, Rosina’s room looking like a cage. And it is from that cage that Rosina shows that she is no pushover as the feisty Claire Booth sings ‘Una voce poco fa’.

There is one more character to meet, the singing teacher Don Basilio, lugubriously portrayed by the bass Graeme Broadbent, and always open to a bribe as he suggests that the best way for Bartolo to get rid of Lindoro/Almaviva and Figaro is with a bit of good dishonest slander. The first act comes to a riotous conclusion as Lindoro arrives with his billeting papers, to which Bartolo presents his exemption. Uproar ensues and the police arrive to settle the breach of the peace, but leaving Rosina no further forward, still trapped in her cage.

Act Two opens with Plan B. Almaviva arrives in yet another disguise, this time as Don Basilio’s supposed assistant, Don Alonso, with a marvellous set of false teeth (apparently Thomas Walker’s own idea). This is where the whole plot descends into farce, complete with a shaving scene that was a little underplayed. But out of this confusion of mistaken identities and stolen ladders, everything ends happily as the notary is bribed into marrying Rosina to Almaviva, rather than to Bartolo, and we are left hoping that everyone lives happily ever after. Or do they? The second play of the trilogy, The Marriage of Figaro, tells us otherwise, and if that isn’t enough the final part, La Mère Coupable, leaves us in no doubt.

This was a five star show. Acting and singing – a universal five stars. The orchestra under maestro James Grossmith – five more stars. Design and production – once again five stars. And what about those nuns savouring their cigars as they celebrate the marriage of Almaviva and Rosina!

As Scottish Opera approaches its golden jubilee, it is reassuring to know that there is a treasury of world class productions in its repertoire, of which this Barber of Seville deserves special mention. When I think back to a young Scottish Opera’s minimalist version back in the 1960s of three curtained cubicles, there is just no comparison with what Inverness has just witnessed.

© James Munro, 2011

Links

• Scottish Opera

RAUNCHY or what? Scottish Opera’s new small-scale touring production reached new heights, or should that be plumbed new depths, as much of the action took place in the underworld?

Strictly speaking this fresh staging of Offenbach’s Orpheus in the Underworld is a co-production with the newly formed Northern Ireland Opera. The production team, under the leadership of Oliver Mears, and several of the main roles came from the Irish side of the partnership, but the style and experience, as well as the musical and financial contributions came from Scottish Opera.

Jane Harrington as Eurydice and Nicolas Sharratt as Orpheus (photo Tommy Ga-Ken wan)

Eighteen venues in Scotland will be visited, mostly with the brilliant piano only accompaniment, before everyone crosses the water for a tour of five venues in Northern Ireland with Scottish Opera’s chamber orchestra. The run will come to an end with eight performances at the beginning of December at the Young Vic in London.

Jacques Offenbach’s comic operetta is to all intents and purposes a very blatant political satire. Back in 1858 Orpheus in the Underworld poked merciless fun at the immoral carrying on of the ruling classes of the French Second Empire of Louis Napoleon. By all accounts their behaviour makes today’s celebrity-obsessed culture tame by comparison, but history has rendered the ridicule of 1858 meaningless to the modern audience, so who better than Rory Bremner to ladle the satire back on with a trowel.

In the well established tradition of the celebrity-driven media that states that the truth should never get in the way of a good story, what does it matter that the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice comes from Greek legend, whereas the ancient gods in this farcical romp were all Roman. And what does it matter that in the original myth Orpheus and Eurydice could not tear their loving eyes away from each other whereas now they want a divorce but worry about their reputations.

Anyway, the show started with a modern version of the Greek Chorus popping up all over the theatre trying to find a way onto the stage. This was Public Opinion (Máire Flavin), aka the tabloid newspaper editors whose self-appointed task was to try and control the characters when things became a little too risqué – some hope!

Orpheus in the Underworld is really an operetta rather than a comic opera. The is a large amount of spoken dialogue between the music which is pure food to Rory Bremner’s talents, but also puts the cast’s acting skills to the test when the singing is not there as a screen. Without exception they pass the test with flying colours. Jane Harrington as Eurydice is the archetype Essex girl, Brendan Collins as Jupiter, Daire Halpin as Diana, Gavan Ring as Pluto, all living their parts to the full. Then there is Scottish Opera Emerging Artist Ross McInroy as Pluto’s sidekick John Styx showing immaculate comic timing.

The jokes are topical and stringent, the situations beggar belief. What sort of mind comes up with the idea of edible knickers or a bit of muscaphilia, not to mention scenes of bondage in an opera? The backdrops were straight out of OK! or Hello magazine or from the title page of the News of the Underworld. The gods are bored of their bar in the clouds and are longing for a bit of action at Pluto’s party down in Hades.

The Citz in Glasgow is a lovely old theatre seemingly stuck in a time warp and a perfect setting for this farcical escapade. Immediately after Saturday’s performance I rushed back up the A9 to Eden Court to try to get a ticket for the Inverness performance. Sold Out! And so, dear reader, in case you have a ticket for one of the shows on the tour, I will not give away any of the non-stop jokes, but be prepared to miss half of them as they fly out at you, and be prepared to sit chuckling with delight for a couple of hours. An absolute triumph!

© James Munro, 2011

Links

• Scottish Opera

FOR those inclined to statistics it will come as no surprise that Verdi’s Rigoletto ranks at number ten in the list of most popular operas of all time. With a treasury of memorable music, a trio of magnetic characters and a plot buzzing with tension from start to finish, it is no wonder that nearly every opera company has a production of this masterpiece in its repertoire.

Not that Verdi and his librettist Piave had it all their own way as they transposed Victor Hugo’s play Le roi s’amuse into an opera. Hugo’s work was banned by the censors in France for nearly half a century as it was considered insulting to the monarchy in the Restoration period to portray a king as an immoral and cynical womaniser.

Eddie Wade and Nadine Livingston (photo Richard Campbell)

However, after some negotiations with the Austrian Board of Censors, who controlled much of northern Italy in the mid-19th century, resulting in the King becoming a fictitious duke and the character of the title changing from a king to the court jester with a name derived from the French rigolo meaning “funny”, Rigoletto received its first performance at La Fenice in Venice in 1851 and was an instant success.

For this new production, Scottish Opera brought in the director Matthew Richardson to make his debut with the company, working alongside designer Jon Morell and lighting designer Tony Rabbit. They chose to bring the action forward some four hundred years to the mid-20eth century and that immediately begs the question as to whether human behaviour can be portrayed as the same in the 1950s as it was in the 1550s?

Bring it forward another fifty years into our celebrity obsessed society, would the tabloid press accept the hedonistic activities of a dissolute aristocrat (or maybe that should be the alleged behaviour of an unnamed premiership footballer)?

Nobody could argue that the sets were in the verissimo style. Much was left to the imagination, whether it was in a curtain wall containing a row of doors, each one revealing another of the Duke’s conquests, or the small box-like space which was home to Gilda, the jester’s daughter. Without doubt there was a shortage of visual distractions that might steal anything away from the music and the singing. Or were the broken mannequins in the ducal apartment meant to symbolise his sexual cast-offs? And were the strange carnivalesque masks worn by the chorus of cuckolded husbands giving an acknowledgement to the Venice Carnival and the site of the first production?

The title role of Rigoletto is a huge part with scarcely a moment when the character is off the stage. It was an inspired choice to cast the English baritone Eddie Wade in the role. He struck a perfect blend of self-hate, cynicism and, in today’s climate, over-protective paternal love. His rich, powerful baritone voice conveyed not just the mocking arrogance of one who knows he enjoys his master’s patronage, but also the tenderness of a caring parent and the anguish of one who finds he has been outwitted both by the targets of his derision and ultimately by his own daughter.

Scottish Opera’s Emerging Artist Programme has nurtured an absolute star in soprano Nadine Livingston who, before this monumental role as Gilda, had been seen as Susannah in The Marriage of Figaro, as Musetta in La Bohème and in the title role in Katya Kabanova. Perhaps having her dressed in a schoolgirl smock and short white socks made her adolescent love for the Duke and her ultimate sacrifice all the more shocking, but the sheer quality of her voice, from when she spotted all those high notes in ‘Caro nome’ to the tender pathos of her final utterings, was exquisite.

The third member of the trio, and the anti-hero, is the tenor. And as the tenor he gets all the best songs, ‘Questa quellar’ or ‘La donna e mobile’, the songs that are hummed and whistled in the streets for days afterwards. Lithuanian Edgaras Montvidas is making quite a reputation for himself both as a singer and, on stage, as a lothario in the role of the Duke of Mantua, after one thing and one thing only, and it mattered to him not a jot upon whom he trampled during his lustful quests. Unsurprisingly, it is the Duke who comes away at the end untouched and unharmed by all the emotional carnage he has caused.

No matter how well the leading characters perform, and how excellent the support they get from the lesser roles such as the various courtiers and the killer Sparafucile and his sister Maddelena, the real star of this opera is the music. So many arias and duets from Rigoletto have become household favourites and the glorious quartet in the final act between the Duke, Maddelena, Gilda and Rigoletto is one of the most sublime passages in all opera.

Down in the pit, the Orchestra of Scottish Opera was in superb voice, with the inspiring Swedish conductor Tobias Ringborg keeping the whole work together from memory and without the use of a score in front of him.

Overall, the singing, the acting and the music from the orchestra were flawless. It’s a shame that the sets and the designs were not of the same supreme quality. Nobody wants opera to survive in a time warp, but anachronistic productions tend to be unconvincing.

© James Munro, 2011

Links

• Scottish Opera

SCOTTISH OPERA might be placing itself as a hostage to fortune by going on the road in the winter months, but it has become something of a tradition to see the show now known as Opera Highlights reaching the far-flung communities of Scotland during February and March. As the show’s Director, Dafydd Burne-Jones puts it, “People in these communities pay their taxes and they have just as much right as people in the major centres to see opera of the highest quality; and if they cannot get to us, then we must get to them.”

Scene from Opera Highlights, with singers Catherine Hopper, Marie Claire Breen, Njabulo Madlala and Nicholas Watts (photo Peter Dibdin)

Three shows a week for five weeks, all contained in a minibus, might seem a tall order, but Opera Highlights have got the format down to a fine art as they tour Scotland from Sanday to Stranraer and from Crawfordjohn to Craignish with four singers and a pianist, plus all their costumes and props as they give shows of performed arias from operas, well known and rarely heard, covering three centuries of this grand art form.
I caught up with them at the Carnegie Hall in Clashmore, where as usual they had attracted a sell-out crowd, as they started the return leg of their tour from Sanday in the Orkneys back to Glasgow via Findhorn and Ullapool.
Scottish Opera’s Head of Music, Derek Clark had devised the programme from his bottomless knowledge of opera and then brought in staff producer Dafydd Burne-Jones to bring the show to life. Four young singers were recruited; RSAMD graduate soprano Marie Claire Breen from Scottish Opera’s Emerging Artist Scheme, mezzo Catherine Hopper from the National Opera Studio, tenor Nicholas Watts who trained at the Royal College of Music and the South African baritone Njabulo Madlala, a Samling scholar and a postgraduate from the Guildhall and Cardiff. The accompanist and music director was the Spanish musician Alison Luz, a former holder of the RSAMD/Scottish Opera Repetiteur Fellowship.
Quartets, trios, duets and solos, twenty-two pieces in all were crafted together to provide variety, from the opening quartet from Mozart’s La finta giardiniera, when both plot and music were the epitome of confusion, to the ever popular ‘Non più andrai’ from Le nozze di Figaro when perhaps Madlala’s tones were too warm and velvety for the cynical Figaro sending the luckless Cherubino off to the army.
The less known numbers included arias from Handel’s Giulio Cesare, Bizet’s La jolie fille de Perth, Rossini’s Le Comte Ory and the beautiful zarzuela-like ‘La maja y el ruiseñor’ from Goyescas by Granados. And it was a fascinating example to hear extracts from both versions of Il barbiere di Siviglia, the familiar one by Gioachino Rossini as well as the earlier version of the same story by Giovanni Paisiello.
Universally, the standard of singing was excellent, even if in such a diverse programme sometimes the singers were asked to sing roles that did not best suit them. For example, Marie Claire Breen who stood out vocally as the most satisfying of the quartet, especially in ‘Quel guardo il cavalieri’ from Donizetti’s Don Pasquale, seemed to have so much fun in everything she sang, making such good use of all her props, but she appeared a little coquettish as the princess Pamina in the extract from Mozart’s The Magic Flute. She would be ideal as Papagena, but lacked the gravitas of a princess.

Similarly Nicholas Watts has a tenor voice that is better suited to the comic roles, such as Don Basilio, rather than the more serious roles of Count Almaviva or Sesto in Giulio Cesare.
When transport space is limited, so too is the selection of props. Even so I lost count of the number of times the singers had a bottle and glass in their hands. However, it helped make the evening go with a swing, and it is just as well the contents were Ribena or cold tea, otherwise nobody can predict how the show would end. But end it had to, with a rumbustious performance of the ‘Champagne’ ensemble from Die Fledermaus by Johann Strauss II, and even then Derek Clark had dug deep into his treasure trove of encores to extract an entertaining quartet rondo called ‘The Magic Carpet Ride’ in which the only discernable words came, on occasion, from Nicholas Watts, ‘whisky’ and ‘frisky’. A great night was had by all.

© James Munro, 2011

Links

• Scottish Opera

ALL AROUND was felt the buzz of anticipation! After the popular triumph of Rossini’s The Barber of Seville in 2007 under the direction of Sir Thomas Allen and his team, there was great excitement as a packed Theatre Royal waited to see Sir Thomas’s touch on the opera based on the second play in the Beaumarchais trilogy, Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro.

Arguably, this is the most universally loved of all operas and the general message is “Mess with it at your peril!” – a message that Sir Thomas had taken to heart, for this is a production very much set in its time, with a few tweaks that add dramatic detail to a plot with more twists than a stick of barley sugar.

Roderick Williams and Kate Valentine as the Count and Countess Almaviva in Scottish Opera's The Marriage of Figaro. Photo - Mark Hamilton

Music Director Francesco Corti was half way through the overture before the curtain rose to reveal the villagers taking in the harvest, offering a foretaste of how Allen handles the garden scene of Act Four and giving us a first glimpse of the romantic antics of Cherubino the pageboy. It is a nice touch to make the overture both dramatically visual as well as musical.

As with the Barber three years ago, Simon Higlett’s designs were creative with delightful colours, and were lit to perfection by Mark Jonathan. If there was one slight anomaly, it was that the huge floor to ceiling windows would be better suited to a stately home in France or central Europe rather than the heat of southern Spain.

But that point cannot be made about the set for the down-at-heel room that Count Almaviva has allocated to Figaro and his bride, Susanna. For there are no windows – just ready access to the rooms of the Count and the Countess should their personal servants be required at any time. It is a perfect removal set up, ideal for the farcical scene that occurs as Susanna has to hide first Cherubino then the Count under the dust sheets.

By the end of the act we have met nearly all the characters. The outstanding Dutch baritone, Thomas Oliemans, returns as Figaro, by this time more mature and less fly-by-night than he was three years ago. His bride, Susanna is beautifully portrayed by former Scottish Opera Emerging Artist Nadine Livingstone.

The acclaimed Mozartian Roderick Williams plays Count Almaviva with a rainbow of emotions from lust to anger, from arrogance to probably short-lived contrition. Making her Scottish Opera debut in the trouser role of Cherubino is the German mezzo Ulrike Mayer, disturbingly realistic as a young boy.

Invernessian Harry Nicoll is deliciously camp as both Don Basilio and Don Curzio, while Leah-Marian Jones and Francesco Facini play Marcellina and Doctor Bartolo, old protagonists with a secret to reveal. Coming later are Martin Lamb as Susanna’s uncle Antonio, the inebriate gardener, and his daughter Barberina, ready to be conquered by Cherubino, sung by another Scottish Opera Emerging Artist, Miranda Sinani.

But one of the most challenging moments in all opera is carried off exquisitely by Inverness-born Kate Valentine as Countess Almaviva. She has to sit out the whole of the first act and then come on cold at the opening of Act Two, set in her rooms, with the haunting and moving aria “Porgi amor”. She gets precisely the right balance of sadness and pathos as she yearns to recapture the love of Almaviva which has turned cold in his arrogance and unfaithfulness.

For this act, Higlett’s design is most elegant, with various pastel hues demarking the various areas of the Countess’s rooms, and a bathtub part-covered for the Count to examine to see if Cherubino is hiding there – another of the little details that set this production apart.

Scottish Opera's The Marriage of Figaro with Roderick Williams as the Count, Kate Valentine as the Countess, Nadine Livingston as Susanna and Thomas Oliemans as Figaro. Photo - Mark Hamilton

In the Count’s rooms, the predominant colour is a strong red, a colour of aggression, and the main feature is a display of dolls signifying his conquests in exercising his droit de seigneur. After all the twists and turns of Figaro’s parentage are resolved, eventually the Count is finessed into conducting the marriages of Figaro to Susanna and Bartolo to Marcellina, but not without being tricked into a false assignation that night in the gardens.

And so the opera goes full circle, for Allen and Higlett have changed the gardens into the cornfield first seen during the overture. Instead of bushes and bowers to hide in, the sheaves of corn provided cover and brought a quite literal meaning to the expression “a roll in the hay”!

While on the subject of literal meanings, why do we translate Le Nozze di Figaro into The Marriage of Figaro? The tale is about the wedding of Figaro and Susanna; the marriage under scrutiny is that of the Count and the Countess.

With full reason, the Glasgow audience loved this production and cheered it to the chandeliers as the ensemble cast took bow after bow after bow. Even the rain cascading in Cowcaddens was not enough to dampen the enthusiasm for a memorable evening.

Sir Thomas Allen has presented Scottish Opera with two fantastic operas; two thirds of Pierre Augustin de Beaumarchais’ Figaro Trilogy in operatic form. Rossini and Sterbini, and Mozart and Da Ponte have done their bit.

The final part, La Mère Coupable, was known in its time as the other Tartuffe, Molière’s classic satirical comedy, It has been turned into an opera by Darius Milhaud, with libretto by his wife Madeleine, and was performed in Geneva in 1966. Just a thought, or maybe there is a reason why it has not entered the repertoire.

The Marriage of Figaro is at Eden Court Theatre, Inverness, on 4 & 6 November, and His Majesty’s Theatre, Aberdeen, on 11 & 13 November.

© James Munro, 2010

Links

• Scottish Opera

LOGIC SUGGESTS that after sixteen years the concept of Opera Highlights, or Essential Scottish Opera as we used to know it, would have become jaded. But not a bit of it. This year’s tour is as fresh as the dew, and if the reaction of the sell-out audience at Findhorn last Saturday is anything to go by, the show’s appeal and popularity are as strong as ever.

Adrian Ward, Robert Tucker, Miranda Sinani and Louise Collett in Opera Highlights (photo - Drew Farrell).

So, how do Scottish Opera manage it? Other than a name change, the company remains faithful to the tried and tested formula of four young singers, a pianist and a semi-staged selection of well-known and little known operatic excerpts, all professionally directed so that the show runs smoothly.

Under its Emerging Artists Programme, Scottish Opera has a ready supply of talented singers to take on the road. Both the female roles, the Albanian soprano Miranda Sinani and the English mezzo Louise Collett, joined this programme after studying at the RSAMD in Glasgow.

For the male roles, both singers were making their Scottish Opera debuts – tenor Adrian Ward, and baritone Robert Tucker, who joins that long line of singers from the antipodes who come to the UK to hone their skills. Add to the quartet pianist Ruth Wilkinson making her first ESO tour, and David Hunter (who was a member of the Out of Eden team at Eden Court Theatre) to make his Scottish Opera directorial debut, and it is easy to understand why this production is so fresh.

Twenty-two excerpts in quick succession, each one linked into the programme, kept the audience enthralled. Starting with Robert Tucker’s rendition of the ‘Champagne Aria’ from Mozart’s Don Giovanni, right through to the quartet ‘I am easily assimilated’ from Bernstein’s Candide, the selection flowed, often with unexpected humour, such as the end-of-the-pier photo booth manner in which Acis and Galatea were scaled down against the giant Polyphemus for ‘The flocks shall leave the mountains’ by Handel, or Miranda Sinani as the drunken statue in the ‘Drinking Song’ from von Suppé’s The Beautiful Galathea.

These days the traditional stand-and-deliver style of opera is no longer acceptable, and acting has become an integral part of the young singer’s training. It is an accepted custom that the tenor gets the best of the male songs, so Adrian Ward was more restrained as he acted and baritone Robert Tucker was more rumbustious.

By contrast for the females, the soprano, Miranda Sinani, gets the best songs, but is also more animated, whereas the mezzo Louise Collett relied on her beautiful warm strong voice and was more subtle in her gestures, as in Walton’s “I was a constant faithful wife’, where the cocking of an eyebrow or the removal of a glove spoke volumes.

The Findhorn performance was but the sixth of twenty-one venues over a seven-week period, making this the longest tour ever undertaken by Scottish Opera. The company move on to Torridon, Ardross, Strathy and Gairloch before heading to Skye, Benebecula and Barra then back to the mainland for communities in the south, ending up at Livingston on Saturday 20 March.

They say that temptation is no fun unless you yield to it, and I am sorely tempted to follow them to one of those venues for a second memorable evening of musical excerpts as they are meant to be presented.

© James Munro, 2010

Links

• Opera Highlights

While the Inverness theatre complex is an obvious focal point for touring shows, and pretty much the only option for large scale productions, it is always good to see smaller scale work doing the rounds of the Highland and Island venues. Scottish Opera’s Essential Scottish Opera has been a very welcome part of that process for many years now, and returns this month, albeit with a new name.

ESO now goes under the rather more self-explanatory name of Opera Highlights, but the formula remains the same. Take four emerging singers, a pianist, an imaginative programme of operatic snippets from a diverse range of sources, hone it all into a thoroughly entertaining show, and pack them all off in a van to visit the parts that opera otherwise doesn’t reach.

This year’s show will visit Strathmiglo, Brechin and Midmar in the northeast before swinging west to Carrbridge, Findhorn, Torridon, Ardross, Strathy, Gairloch, Skye, Benbecula, Barra, Benderloch, Killin and Tarbert, with several more dates further south to follow. It is their biggest ever tour, and if it is anywhere near as good as last year’s ESO offering – one of the best I can remember – then it is not to be missed.

It is a shame, though, that the visit to Carrbridge should coincide with a concert in the Osprey Music Society’s season just along the road in Boat of Garten that same night. Mark Morpurgo made a similar point regarding events in Argyll a couple of months ago, and for the same reason – there is a considerable overlap in the local audience for these two events, and both are likely to suffer as a consequence.

The opera singers won’t be the only ones hitting the road this month, either. Glasgow-based Birds of Paradise start a tour with their new show, Davey Anderson’s Clutter Keeps Company, in Mull, with several more dates thereafter.

Back at Eden Court, theatrical delights on offer include Tall Stories adaptation of Room On The Broom, a popular story for the 3+ audience by Julia Donaldson (author of The Gruffalo); a return for NLP Theatre’s Singin’ I’m No A Billy He’s a Tim, seen here last year; and a touring production of Willy Russell’s phenomenally popular musical Blood Brothers. Oh, and Circus of Horrors and The Chippendales, but let’s not go there.

Mention, too, for the ever-imaginative Scottish Ensemble, who stretch even their elastic boundaries in a programme in which tenor Toby Spence will sing new arrangements of songs by Belgian singer Jacques Brel. On more familiar ground, local heroes Session A9 will hold court in the OneTouch, while the annual Inverness Fiddlers Rally is always a popular event.

Still in Inverness, another new arts venue has opened its doors. The Bike Shed in Merkinch is a more modest affair than that other recent re-opening across the river, Highland Print Studio, but it promises to fill a gap in the local community, and to provide an inexpensive facility for artists from all across the Highlands & Islands. Annie Marrs tells us all about it in this month’s interview.

Kenny Mathieson
Commissioning Editor, Northings

Kenny Mathieson - Commissioning Editor, Northings.

Kenny Mathieson lives and works in Boat of Garten, Strathspey. He studied American and English Literature at the University of East Anglia, graduating with a BA (First Class) in 1978, and a PhD in 1983. He has been a freelance writer on various arts-related subjects since 1982, and contributes to the Inverness Courier, The Scotsman, The List, and other publications. He has contributed to numerous reference books, and has written books on jazz and Celtic music.

The Italian Girl in Algiers - Adrian Powter as Taddeo, Karen Cargill as Isabella and Tiziano Bracci as Mustafa (Photo - Drew Farrell)

SCOTTISH Opera’s tongue-in-cheek rationale for staging these two Italian comedies side-by-side – that a bit of Italianate warmth and colour might not be unwelcome in another damp-ish British summer – was more than vindicated by the gales and lashing rain of this particular weekend.

It was vindicated on stage, too, in two very different approaches to staging classic comic operas. Donizetti’s The Elixir of Love is a revival of Giles Havergal’s 1994 production (actually a second revival ­ it was also done again in 2001), and it has more than stood the test of the passing years.

Russell Craig’s stage set is literally framed in a huge picture frame, and looked a treat from start to finish, if occasionally a shade crowded in the full chorus scenes. The cast was not only new to this production, but largely new to Scottish Opera, including the excellent principals, Elena Xanthoudakis as Adina and Edgaras Montvidas as the love-struck Nemorino.

Both were excellent singers and strong actors, as was Francesco Facini as the quack doctor Dulcamara, a gift of a comic role which he seized to the full without ever overdoing it. Much the same can be said of Marin Bronikowski as the pompous sergeant, Belcore. Both are fine singers, and neither ever lapsed into turning their characters into simple caricatures.

Sarah Redgwick – a more familiar face in Scottish Opera productions – was a characterful Giannetta, while Martin Docherty clowned in amiably Chaplin-esque fashion in the silent role of Gaetano, Dulcamara’s companion. The cast worked well as an ensemble, and the large chorus added colour and movement as well as strong singing to a hugely enjoyable take on a well-loved classic.

Francesco Corti, the Musical Director of Scottish Opera, was in the pit for these performances, but James Grossmith will be on the podium for the two performances in Inverness (see below).

Rossini’s The Italian Girl in Algiers will also be seen in a single performance in Inverness, but if The Elixir of Love received a traditional style of production, the opposite was the case in an imaginative re-invention of Rossini’s opera. The production originated in New Zealand, where director Colin McCall has acknowledged that they are less bound by European traditions of opera.

Those with firm ideas on how Rossini should look would do well to leave their preconceptions at home – but on no account pass up the chance to see this hilarious production. The action takes place in a television studio rather than the Mustafa’s harem, where a Latino soap opera called Algiers is being made, complete with all the paraphernalia of cameras, mixing desks, etc (the set and lighting design by Tony Rabbit is wonderful).

The traditional chorus of eunuchs are now the television crew, while the actors perform on an area of lurid green, where their actions are projected onto a huge screen using green screen technology to create various backgrounds. The technical ingenuity at work here is superb, and is matched by the comic imagination which has gone into the show.

The visual jokes come thick and fast, but Rossini is not forgotten in the midst of all this wizardry. The Italian Girl is one of his most attractive and effervescent scores, and an excellent cast – led by Karen Cargill as Isabella – do full justice to the music, while entering equally fully into the fun.

Scottish Opera debutant Tiziano Bracci was a fine Mustafa, and Adrian Powter (Taddeo), Mary O’Sullivan (Elvira), Julia Riley (Zulma) and Paul Carey Jones (Haly) all provided strong support, as did the chorus, clearly relishing their re-invented roles, and orchestra under Wyn Davies.

Special mention on this occasion for Christian Baumgartel as Lindoro, who had flown in that day from France to replace the indisposed Thomas Walker, whose understudy was also unwell. Baumgartel sang the role in the original New Zealand production, and reprised it in fine style here on the back of a single run-through.

Presumably Walker will be restored to vigour by the time this unorthodox but irresistible production reaches Inverness.

The Elixir of Love is at Eden Court Theatre on 4 & 6 November 2009, and The Italian Girl in Algiers on 7 November 2009. The Elixir of Love Unwrapped is on 5 November 2009.

© Kenny Mathieson, 2009

Links

• Scottish Opera

SCOTTISH Opera’s admirable reduced scale touring programme in which a full opera is performed with piano accompaniment has generally focused on the lighter end of the operatic spectrum in productions like The Marriage of Figaro, Hansel and Gretel or Die Fledermaus.

Joanne Boag as Kátya Kabanová (© Eamonn MacGoldrick)

In that context, the decision to take on Janácek’s Kátya Kabanová as this season’s touring show is a bold one. Right from the ominous opening chords, it is clear that what lies ahead will inevitably be tragic, and Jan·cek’s operas are not yet common currency in the popular operatic repertoire in the same way that those of Mozart or Strauss are.

It is good to be able to report, then, that the gamble (if it is one) has paid off. The production was well-cast, and the set worked well even in the cramped confines of Victoria Hall, the smallest stage they will encounter on their tour. I suspect in the larger venues there will be more separation between the two areas representing the Kabanov household and the banks of the Volga.

Not for the first time, Ian Ryan’s superb pianism allowed us to forget the absence of an orchestra – the music was all there, and in some respects was thrown into even more intense relief in this form.

Joanne Boag (last seen in the Highlands & Islands on the Essential Scottish Opera tour earlier this year) and Nadine Livingston are sharing the role of the tragic Kátya. Boag sang it powerfully here, catching the tormented emotions and guilt-ridden grief of the doomed heroine very well. Jonathan Finney stood in for Michael Bracegirdle (who was unwell) as her lover, Boris, and acquitted himself soundly in the role.

Caryl Hughes, who sang Cinderella in the touring production of Rossini’s opera a couple of years ago, was a lively and vivacious Varvara, and Emma Carrington suitably icy as Kátya’s mother-in-law and nemesis, the heartless Kabanicha. Kally Lloyd-Jones, in her first foray into directing opera, rather compromised the latter character’s unforgiving stoniness by suggesting a moment of remorse over Kátya’s body at the end, not part of Janácek’s vision of the character.

The other twist in the finale was the means by which Kátya commits suicide, a bottle of poison being rather easier to stage than the traditional end, where she throws herself in the Volga. Lloyd-Jones did a convincing job on her debut, and drew playfully on her dance experience in the scene in which Varvara and Kudrjash (Ben Thapa) meet by the river prior to the more momentous encounter of Kátya and Boris.

Simon Crosby Buttle played Kátya’s husband, Tikhon, and captured perfectly his dithering, anguished confusion at being caught between his wife and hostile mother, with Anders Östberg as Dikoy, Raphaela Mangan as Glasha, and Paul Reeves as Kuligin.

The show tours until late October, with performances in Stornoway (19 September), Elgin (22 September), Aboyne (24 September), Lerwick (26 September), Kirkwall (29 September), Wick (1 October), Strontian (3 October) and Fort William (8 October) on their itinerary. The production will also be seen in Aberdeen and at Eden Court in Inverness in May 2010.

© Kenny Mathieson, 2009

Links

• Scottish Opera 

Auntie Janet Saves the Planet - Frances Morrison as Madame Pipistrelle and Steven Struthers as Sargeant George (Photo - Drew Farrell)

QUEUING outside the theatre doors, children and family members were asked if they would become voles before being led in to the performance by the brown soldier hare and his marching drum. With spots on their noses and pink vole ears, the audience marched into the theatre.

Comfy cushions were placed on the floor where the first three rows of seating would normally be in the OneTouch, and most of the children popped down on them, ready for the performance. The delightful set on stage captivated them.

Auntie Janet (a hen) was having a crisis, she informed the audience, and needed help. Her lovely woodland and home would be bulldozed in the morning by the loggers, if she couldn’t find the one thing that could save her environment. Her pals, the Brown Hare (Sgt George), Song Thrush (Mavis) and Pippistrelle Bat were going to help her. Auntie Janet said they were to find the song that would stop the disaster, but they had to be back by dawn for it to work.

So the three set off on their adventure, narrowly escaping the jaws of Brutus the cat in the woods, and came across the travelling carnival with some very engaging and amusing puppets. The first character, Noxious Stinkerton – a rat obsessed with cleanliness (he was in the bath at the time of performance on stage) had the first part of the song, which he shared with Sgt George.

There was something fundamental George had to do so that he could learn the new beat – and that was to change his old ways and play the rhythm Noxious taught him. All the voles in the audience were encouraged to get up and dance along to the new groovy beat and Sgt George had learned that change was possible and it was good.

Next came Olga Petrova, mistress of the skies (an Eastern European bumble bee with hayfever) who taught the group the harmony. Again more audience engagement with children dancing and singing along with the stage characters. Melody came next from the world’s strongest micro-organism – Giganticus Rex – who could only be seen through a large magnifying glass.

The voles, of course, knew the rest of the song, because they were clever and know the colours of the rainbow. And with a huge group effort with audience and characters working together, they managed to get the song back in time to Auntie Janet. Each character having accepted that change could only happen, if they were prepared to alter something about themselves and learn to sing a new song.

The tale was amusing, engaging and sweet. And the message was this – “When you stand together and the song you sing is true, everybody listens to you.” With a moral to the story, an education in how to make music and interesting characters, this musical brings a great deal to performance for children. And when the characters left stage, the children in the audience were reluctant to leave, staying a good while to dance to the music and probably hoping someone would come out again. A sign that they had a good time.

© Jelica Gavrilovic, 2009

Links

• Scottish Opera

Anne-Sophie Duprels as Manon (photo - Mark Robertson)

I WENT to bed the other night with a haunting little tune going through my mind, diddle iddle ee da dee pom pom, and it was still there in the morning. It wasn’t a musical cup of black coffee; I slept perfectly, on a cloud of euphoria after being one of the modest audience to relish the new Scottish Opera production of Manon, by the French composer Jules Massenet.

If I had to sum up this version of Manon briefly, I would say it was lavish and awash with dramatic metaphors. The costumes, designed by the Canadian André Barbe, were a pure reflection of the fashionable nobility of pre-Revolution France. His design for the set was also a pure reflection, but here was a huge broken mirror with a golden tinge, as though inviting the cast to see themselves in all their extravagance, frippery and facileness, and yet all the time there was the foreboding of doom.

For most of a decade Barbe has been working in partnership with his fellow Canadian Renaud Doucet, a director and choreographer with a background in dance. No prizes then for realising that all the stage movements of the whole cast had been calculated to the finest detail, or why a sextet of baroque dancers were brought in for the spectacle of the scene in the Cours la Reine.

It was customary for a ballet to be included in 19th century productions at the Paris Opera, but Doucet chose the more correct baroque style of dance that was seen a hundred years earlier. Making up the Canadian triumvirate was lighting designer Guy Simard, responsible for the golden wash over the whole production, and doubtless also for the rather annoying spotlight that reflected off the mirrored backdrop into certain seats in the auditorium.

We first see Manon in a giant picture frame, portrayed as an innocent country maid, while the Orchestra of Scottish Opera are playing the prelude under the baton of their new Music Director, Francesco Corti, making his Inverness debut, and giving us a foretaste of the wonderful melodies to come.

The story of Manon is taken straight from the novel by the Abbé Prévost, L’histoire du Chevalier des Grieux et de Manon Lescaut, and like all opera has a hugely complicated plot full of hard to believe twists and turns. The fifteen-year-old Manon arrives by coach in Arras on her way to a convent where her worldly instincts are to be subdued. She is under the care of her cousin, who is easily distracted to go gambling, leaving Manon in the sights of Guillot de Morfontaine, a nobleman roué and his companion De Bretigny who are entertaining a trio of actresses (I said there were quite a few metaphors).

De Morfontaine sees his chance and offers Manon the use of his coach while he finishes his business with the actresses. Enter the young Chevalier des Grieux who takes one look at Manon, they fall in love, escape to Paris in the borrowed coach and set up home together. Then it all gets really believable!

Des Grieux is kidnapped by his father, and trains to go into the church. Manon shows her true colours and gets cared for by a succession of rich noblemen, who are a lot less rich by the time she has finished. Then she seduces Des Grieux from going into the church, gets through his inheritance and takes him to a gaming house to try and win some more money.

This he succeeds in doing, at the expense of de Morfontaine, who gets his revenge on the couple by getting them arrested, him for cheating at cards and her for prostitution. He is released; she gets banished for life to the colonies. Des Grieux manages to get the guard to release Manon from the chain-gang on the road to Le Havre and exile, but she is totally exhausted and dies in his arms.

It’s not so very long ago that opera singers were expected just to stand there and sing; now they have to be able to act as well. And act well they did. In the title role the petite French singer, Anne Sophie Dupreis, showed a delightful warm rich soprano voice, and played the part with appropriate coquettishness.

The young Des Grieux was Liverpudlian Paul Charles Clark, a fine tenor with the right amount of naivety. Inevitably the biggest cheer went to Harry Nicoll as Guillot de Morfontaine, back before his home audience, playing the part to the hilt, the picture of snooty elegance in satins, silks and feathered hats, and obviously loving every minute of it.

But with the numbers involved, a chorus and a corps of dancers as well as a several smaller roles, this was very much an ensemble production and everyone deserves a share of the praise for a memorable evening. And we must not forget the artists of the wardrobe department responsible for the huge range of the most lavish and ornate costumes that Scottish Opera have ever put on a stage.

Manon is described as an opera comique, but I must end with a very serious question. What is it about Inverness opera-goers that makes them so reluctant to experience spectacularly good works with which they are not familiar? On previous visits to the Highlands by Scottish Opera the audiences for Cimarosa’s The Secret Marriage, Judith Weir’s A Night at the Chinese Opera and Verdi’s Falstaff were disappointing, to say the least.

Yet all three were highly entertaining and were first class performances. Ticket sales for Mozart’s Cosi fan tutte this week were respectable, and it was the third production that Scottish Opera had brought to the Highland capital in recent years. I’m not complaining about that, as this David McVicar production was as good as any I’ve seen anywhere, but I am complaining about the lack of adventure shown by the Inverness audience.

Scottish Opera are back at Eden Court in November with two operas new to Inverness, Donizetti’s The Elixir of Love and Rossini’s The Italian Girl in Algiers. Both are great fun and I promise that you will not be disappointed with either of them. After that, in May 2010, only one opera is being staged here, Puccini’s La Bohème, yet again. The message is clear. Unless you want a diet of operatic pot-boilers then you need to come out of your corners and try something unfamiliar.

© James Munro, 2009

Links

• Scottish Opera

Caitlin Hulcup as Dorabella, Marie McLaughlin as Despina and Violet Noorduyn as Fiordilgi in Cosi Fan Tutte (photo - Richard Campbell)

MENTIONING that I was going to see this, somebody said, “The trouble with ‘Cosi’ is the plot is so complicated”. Not in the hands of David McVicar and Scottish Opera, it isn’t; the cast’s excellent acting skills often rendered the surtitles redundant in this comedy of deceit.

Cynical, worldweary Don Alfonso, sung and acted to perfection by Peter Savidge, does not believe in fidelity, and cajoles two idealistic young officers, Ferrando (Joel Prieto) and Guigelmo (Ville Rusanen), to put their fiancees Dorabella (Caitlin Huldcup) and Fiordiligi (Violet Noorduyn) to the test by disguising themselves as Albanians (presumably shorthand for dashing young hotheads in Mozart’s Vienna) and attempting to seduce them.

Alfonso bribes the sisters’ maid, Despina (Marie McLaughlin), to assist him in his dastardly plan and keeps stepping up the pressure on the unfortunate girls. With the cards so stacked against them it is no wonder that despite an initially fervent resistance they eventually prove him right; women – shock! horror! – can be as fickle as men.

Alfonso wins the bet, and the girls end up with each other’s fiances. It’s the sort of romp dependent on the suspension of disbelief which everyone from Boccaccio to Shakespeare to Gilbert & Sullivan to Hollywood screenwriters has had fun with, and Scottish Opera are no exception.

Relegating the chorus to the boxes on either side of the stage resulted in a coup de theatre when they first stood and sang, and left the stage clear for the sweeping lines of Yannis Thavoris’ sets to create maximum impact, slightly marred when a piece of Act 2′s moonlit garden was lowered prematurely from the flies to dangle, perplexingly, over the Bay of Naples in Act 1.

The action has been moved forward to the end of the 19th century, as Scottish Ballet did for their recent Sleeping Beauty, a period which is foreshadowed for us by the knowledge of what is to come – the First World War, the Bolshevik Revolution, the Age of the Machine and universal suffrage. It makes so much sense for Cosi fan tutte to be set towards the end of the Age of Innocence, and Tanya McCullin’s costumes, while not desirably lush as her lavish gowns for La Traviata [they saved lavish for Manon - Ed.], were suitably evocative.

The four young principals acquitted themselves with distinction. Joel Prieto and Violet Noorduyn had perhaps a slight edge on their partners for richness and strength of voice but it was a close-run thing. Marie McLaughlin threw herself into the role of Despina like a latterday Elsie Tanner, rolling up her skirts, slapping her thighs and, from time to time, her fellow singers, to the continuing delight of the audience.

In the ensemble work, particularly at close of each act in “Ah che tutta in un momento” and “Fate presto, o caro amici”, the company’s voices were entwined in a beautifully balanced bouquet. Another treat for all the senses from Scottish Opera.

© Jennie Macfie, 2009

Links

• Scottish Opera
• Jennie Macfie

Samuel Evans and Joshua Ellicot (photo - Peter Dibdin)

WITH CHAMPAGNE, flowers, and laughter, four young singers pranced and trilled their way to the front of the Pavilion auditorium as if arriving at a rather good party, skipping onto the stage and launching straight into ‘L’orgia’, from Rossini’s Serate musicale, which extols the joys of wine and women.

Top marks to director Ashley Dean, as I cannot believe there was anyone in the capacity Strathpeffer audience who wasn’t instantly captivated by the collective vivacity and joie de vivre on show.

And the evening was a very good party, showcasing a wide-ranging box of operatic delights assembled by Scottish Opera’s Head of Music, Derek Clark. There was Mozart, of course, including a taster of SO’s next touring production by the great David McVicar, Cosi fan tutte, but also many unexpected gems including soprano Joanne Boag’s heartrending interpretation of ‘Senza mamma, o bimbo, tu sei morto’ from what is probably Puccini’s least-known opera, Suor Angelica.

Chloe de Backer’s performance of the ‘Flower Song’ from Gounod’s ‘Faust’ demonstrated the range and depth of her lovely mezzo-soprano, while bass-baritone Samuel Evans threw himself happily into the delightful ‘If you doubt me’ from Cimarosa’s The Secret Marriage, with its treasurably memorable couplet, “Would you like to be deflowered/ by a bully and a coward?”. Tenor Joshua Ellicott showed an equally deft and very endearing touch for comedy, displayed to perfection by both men in ‘Duetto de la Chartreuse vert’ by Chabrier.

Great opera performances require acting chops as well as great voices, and these four young singers, dressed in black, demonstrated their considerable range as they changed characters and moods in a trice by donning a shawl here, a hat there, or most impressively by a change of stance and mien.

Pianist (and Musical Director) Philip Voldman was as unobtrusive as a good accompanist must be. Particular mention must be made of Dundee’s Joanne Boag, making her second outing for Scottish Opera, who has that indefinable quality which makes an audience just dote upon her immediately. A name to watch.

The joy of the Essential Scottish Opera format is that it’s the ideal introduction to opera for audiences of all ages and a brilliant way of letting recent graduates learn the arcane skills of audience management in smaller venues. A lot more fun for them than standing in the back row of the chorus, and an evening of pure delight for audiences up and down the land, with a chance to spot the stars of the future.

The company encored with Noel Coward’s prophetic ‘Bad times are just around the corner’ from 1938, delivered with brio and elan. “We’d better all learn that one”, said my neighbour….

© Jennie Macfie, 2009

Links

• Scottish Opera

Carmen Giannattasio, Alan Fairs, Federico Lepre and Katherine Allen in La Traviata (photo - Drew Farrell)

THERE IS culture, and there’s high culture. David McVicar’s production of Verdi’s evergreen tragedy, La Traviata, is triumphantly high culture. It is the perfect riposte to anyone who has ever voiced a qualm at the amount of taxpayers’ money being handed over to Scottish Opera.

Every penny of the production budget is evidenced on stage. Which is not to say that it was cluttered with props and gewgaws, far from it, but designer Tanya McCallin has had the luxury of time to consider, pare and source every detail.

The curtains are worth a review of their own. Acres of black brocade, intricately swagged and draped, drawn back in cinematic wipes, falling back funereally; vast swathes of white muslin half veiling the sunlit country home of tragic heroine Violetta Valery (Carmen Giannattasio) and her ardent young lover Alfredo Germont (Federico Lepre).

The costumes nod stylistically and stylishly to Lautrec, Degas, Renoir and – for Violetta’s darkest purple velvet in the initial party scene – the American portraitist John Singer Sargent.

But to begin at the beginning. As Scottish Opera’s orchestra delicately essay the opening bars of Verdi’s score, Alfredo crosses the stage shuffling through the fallen leaves, as behind him we see Violetta’s apartment, shrouded in dustcloths, waiting for the bailiffs. Her tombstone, etched diagonally, provides the floor for the whole opera, an everpresent memento mori.

Then the brocade is drawn up and we are thrown headlong into the luxurious gaiety of the Belle Epoque, where courtesan Violettta’s party to celebrate her return into society after a bout of tuberculosis is in full swing. Giannattasio does not recall Sutherland, arguably the best Violetta ever, but she is a strong contender for the crown currently held by Ileana Cotrubas, with her comparatively slight frame, beautiful, passionately soulful voice and superb acting ability.

Above all she has star quality; when she leaves the stage, the audience pines for her return. It is a shame that Lepre’s light tenor is no match for her, lending the major duets an unevenness which robs them of some of their fire. Luckily Richard Zeller’s Germont senior had the depth and strength to compensate for his onstage son.

But that’s a small quibble. The sensual, airy lightness of the country love nest and the sumptuous, scarlet, crimson and peach exuberance of the “Moulin Rouge” party will live long in the memory. And then it’s back to black, to Violetta’s apartment, the bed of sickness lit with a greenish tinge draining all colour from the scene as the strings moan and cry.

The dying Violetta crawls on her bed like a Burne-Jones sibyl, Alfredo appears at the last minute to sweep her into his arms, and can there be a dry eye in the house as she finally expires?

Not that this reviewer could see, through her brimming tears….. Why this tragic love story reprising Dumas’ La Dame Aux Camellias and spawning dozens of plays and films, including the saccharine Pretty Woman, should continue to have such power in the post-feminist 21st century is material for a handful of doctoral theses – but hey, that’s high culture for you.

I would be fascinated to hear what the Munlochy Primary School pupils who sat utterly enthralled at the Traviata Unwrapped session on Wednesday made of it. It will surely be hard for them now to be seduced by the two-dimensional television schtick of X Factor – other schools, please copy.

© Jennie Macfie, 2008

Links

• Scottish Opera

Renate Arends, Wendy Dawn Thompson and Rebecca Bottone in The Secret Marriage

TODAY Domenico Cimarosa is one of opera’s best kept secrets, though in the late 18th century he far outshone his contemporary Mozart. He had already composed over 50 successful, mostly comic, operas when The Secret Marriage (Il matrimonio segreto) premiered to the Austrian court in February 1792, only two months’ after the pauper’s death of Wolfgang Amadeus. It was such a hit that the Emperor commanded the company to dine with him and repeat the whole show in his private apartments.

Scottish Opera’s premiere production of this work is complete entertainment from the moment the curtain goes up on the gloriously chic 1950s-style costumes worn by Carolina (Rebecca Bottone), her elder sister Elisetta (Renate Arends) and their aunt Fidalma (Wendy Dawn Thompson).

Straight out of the pages of Vogue, they stride and strut, pose and swirl like catwalk models, in and out of doors and up and down the staircase that dominates Tom Rogers’ supremely elegant set. The cast shared the light touch essential for comic acting, all their voices were beautifully balanced, while Bottone’s coloratura runs were a particular pleasure.

The libretto of Cimarosa’s opera is based on The Clandestine Marriage, by English actor/manager David Garrick. Donald Pippin’s retranslation from the Italian contains some nicely judged, and in some cases positively treasurable, lines, often with a very Gilbert & Sullivan feel. Some examples for your delectation, ladies and gentlemen…

“Thoroughly rotten, better forgotten
This is the man I want her to wed”

“The bottle that I’ve got’ll
put him back upon his feet”

“Would you want to be deflowered
By a bully and a coward?”

…and there’s much, much more where that came from.

The elaborate plot revolves about a farcical array of misunderstandings, as the noble suitor to whom Geronimo is offering Elisetta falls for her younger sister Carolina, who is already married, unbeknownst to anyone, to the family butler Paulino – with whom their aunt Fidalma is besotted.

Transposing the action from the 1790s to the 1950s works surprisingly well, the marriage customs of the debutantes and their ‘delights’ having many parallels with the arranged marriages of bygone times. When the secretly married couple prepare to run away together in Carolina’s bedroom, her four poster bed is decorated with James Dean pinups while she and Paulino are now dead ringers for Sandy and Danny in Grease, just one more spot-on detail in a production that is delightful, delicious and delovely from beginning to end.

© Jennie Macfie, 2008

Links

• Scottish Opera

The Merry Widow presented by Scottish Opera (photo - Mark Hamilton)

HANNA GLAWARI may have inherited twenty million from her banker husband, but it has not stopped this merry widow from entertaining the people of Scotland in twenty-five communities over a couple of months, courtesy of Scottish Opera’s 2008 touring production of the sparkling Franz Lehár operetta The Merry Widow.

Madame Glawari’s elegant progress arrived in Drumnadrochit just in time for her and her retinue of diplomats to celebrate the birthday of the Prince of Pontevedro.

Suffice to say that the plot of the operetta revolves around the efforts of the Embassy staff to persuade the wealthy Hanna to marry a Pontevedrian, and not one of the other diplomats who are courting her. It is essential that her wealth remains under Pontevedrian control, to prevent that beleaguered country from doing an Iceland.

Count Danilo Danilovitch, the First Secretary of the Embassy, is instructed, for the sake of the fatherland, to marry the merry widow, contrary to his basic instinct of playing the field, and despite the fact that the two of them have a history. After a catalogue of confusion and intrigue more akin to a Feydeau farce, a satisfactory conclusion for all concerned is reached, helped by a series of memorable foot-tapping songs.

One of the great benefits of these touring Scottish Opera productions is that they give valuable experience to recent graduates from the conservatoires around the country, who then go on to notable careers in the opera world. The names of Lisa Milne, Claire Wilde and Kate Valentine come to mind, all of whom delighted audiences in village halls and community centres up and down Scotland in previous productions. Time will tell which of this cast will become household names, but be sure that not a few of them have successful careers ahead of them.

There was a slight change of emphasis in the way that The Merry Widow was presented. Past productions, such as Die Fledermaus (2006) and La Cenerentola (2007), have had fully staged sets and a mere half dozen singers. For this tour, director Clare Whistler chose a more flexible and versatile set, but used a full cast of fourteen artists, thereby giving more presence to the ensemble sequences.

The audience were invited to use their imagination for the location of the various scenes, according to the positioning of curtains to indicate an embassy room, or a garden, or the ballroom in Hanna Glawari’s house. This is not a new technique; something similar, and even less elaborate, was utilised by Scottish Opera for a full-scale production of The Barber of Seville back in the company’s early days in the 1960s. And very effective it was, in that it encouraged the audience to concentrate on the music and the singers.

When casting the main roles for The Merry Widow Scottish Opera played it safe by using singers already known to the company, with one exception. In the title role was Welsh soprano, Stephanie Corley, last seen as Musseta in La Bohème. From her initial entrance in a spectacular helter-skelter shaped hat her presence commanded attention with an ideal balance between decorum and flirtatiousness.

In an intimate space like the Craigmonie Centre, and with no more than piano accompaniment, no voices needed to be stretched, and hers was sweet and appealing. Her reluctant suitor, Count Danilo, was sung by Alexander Grove, a Manchester graduate and past member of Essential Scottish Opera. Another pleasing voice, but some fine- tuning would enhance his acting.

The Ambassador, Baron Mirko Zeta, was played by Australian Adam Miller, a part of last year’s Essential Scottish Opera tour. He was convincing as a genial, if naïve, patriot, determined to do the best for his country, but unable to notice all the attention being paid to his wife, Valencienne, by the French attaché, Camille, sung by Eire’s Mary O’Sullivan and John-Colyn Gyeantey, making his debut with Scottish Opera.

Other roles in this tortuous delight of intrigue and high living were played by Andrew Dickinson, Giles Davies, Daniel Grice, Catharine Rogers, Francis Church, Louise Collett, James Arthur, Susan Boyd and Harry Ward. But maybe the most demanding role of all was filled by pianist Ian Ryan, capably and energetically impersonating a full orchestra.

Past autumn tours by Scottish Opera have returned to the road the following spring, but with a small orchestra rather than piano accompaniment, which always raised the sense of occasion. Unfortunately, I understand that there are no plans to give The Merry Widow the same treatment. But perhaps the staging is insufficiently complicated to justify the higher level of production, and maybe the economics do not add up when the cast is so much larger.

It is a fashion in opera to stage works in the present day, to make the inevitably unbelievable storyline more timeless and relevant to the audience. One thinks of Prince Orlofski in Die Fledermaus sporting an eastern European accent and wearing a Heart of Midlothian football shirt.

But The Merry Widow was firmly rooted in the years before the First World War, with the costumes designed by Dody Nash being typical of the time. Imagine if this production had not been firmed up before the current global financial turmoil. It could have been such a wonderful feast of satire as well as a most enjoyable night out.

© James Munro, 2008

Links

• Scottish Opera

Caryl Hughes as Angelina in Scottish Opera's Cinderella (photo - Mark Hamilton).

IN HIS DAY, Gioacchino Rossini was a prolific composer – he had turned out 25 operas before he was thirty, and wrote his last, William Tell, at 37, when he still had nearly 40 years to live. Perhaps his problem was that, in general, they were nearly all too long, and after a brilliant overture the musical dialogue tended to the florid which contained little to remember.

The exceptions were of course, The Barber of Seville which has retained its place in the repertoire, and his other opera buffa which traditionally enjoys an occasional airing, La Cenerentola, Rossini’s take on the Cinderella fairy tale.

Its airings are occasional as Rossini scored the title role for that rara avis of the opera world, the coloratura contralto. When a good one comes along, such as Caryl Hughes, producers flock like twitchers and the opera loving public reap the rewards.

Scottish Opera may not be the only company which has staged it recently, but the others will have to go a long way to match the production which reached Elgin and Tain as part of a tour of Scotland’s public halls. There was not seat to be had as Moray turned out in force to welcome one of Scotland’s national treasures to their home.

We all think we know the story of Cinderella from the ubiquitous pantomime, but so rushed were Rossini and his librettist Jacopo Ferretti that they plagiarised much of the libretto by Charles-Guillaume Etienne of a French version of the opera by the Maltese composer Nicolo Isouard.

There are some similarities to the classic panto, but the opera is very much a social satire, rather than an all-out, happy-ever-after romp. There is plenty of humour, not least in this translation by Arthur Jacobs, but there is a darkness hovering over the whole affair as Rossini ridicules the antics of the aristocracy.

Tom Rogers’ set is a clever design that transports us easily from the faded baronial pile, home to the dysfunctional family of Baron Magnifico, to the splendid palace of Prince Ramiro and ends up in a rustic scene inspired by the allegorical paintings of Titian. And his costumes conjure up memories of Pride and Prejudice, even to the extent of Nicholas Ransley as Ramiro resembling Colin Firth, or maybe Rory Bremner!

Following last autumn’s tour when the music was provided by the hyper-energetic piano of Ian Ryan, for this outing the singers enjoyed the company of The Orchestra of Scottish Opera, albeit in reduced format, under the baton of Oliver Rundell. Last year, Cinderella was an intimate soirée in the village hall, the perfect introduction to opera. This time the orchestra turned it into an event, taking the whole character of the evening up a gear.

In a medium sized venue such as Elgin Town Hall, there are obviously physical constraints to the size of an orchestra (and there may be financial ones as well), which resulted in an unfortunate balance, leaving the sound dominated by the wind. Perhaps for future tours space could be found for another couple of violins, effectively doubling their contribution.

Two of the three ladies hailed from the Land of Song – fellow Celts cutting their Welsh teeth with Scottish Opera. Of the two sisters, both sopranos, Katherine Allen toured last year with Essential Scottish Opera and since then has been studying at the National Opera Studio in London. The value of this course was exemplified by the improvement in her stagecraft and her delivery, although her role of Tisbe should have invited the audience to dislike her, and in this she did not succeed.

Her stage sister, Clorinda, was sung by the Australian Amanda Forbes, a recent member of Welsh National Opera, also seen on the recent Essential Scottish Opera tour and also the beneficiary of training at the National Opera Studio. She was more convincing as a materialistic husband-hunting air-head, with a fine voice.

The title role went to the newcomer to the world of opera, Caryl Hughes, who abandoned a potential career in the law after winning a scholarship at the National Eisteddfod. Her beautiful warm rich contralto voice immediately appealed to the audience and her natural manner effectively conveyed the character of the downtrodden Cinderella with the hidden steely will.

The four male characters also demonstrated the internationality of the opera world, a Frenchman, two Englishmen and another Australian. It says much for Scottish Opera that they can attract the cream of young singers to perform in a short touring production, even if it is an unfortunate irony that of the seven singers only the Frenchman has benefited from the excellent training at RSAMD in Glasgow, just across the road from Scottish Opera’s home at the Theatre Royal.

As the Prince, Nicholas Ransley displays an excellent arrogant vanity so reminiscent of a Jane Austen hero. His entourage in the form of Marc Labonnette as the tutor Alidoro and Julian Hubbard as the valet Dandini have more chance to present colourful characters and although subservient to the Prince, they thrive in the opportunities he allows.

Dean Robinson as Baron Magnifico was the nearest the opera has to a scheming baddie who evinces little sympathy from the audience. Having frittered away his step-daughter’s dowry on the aspirations of his natural daughters, he tries to plot his way to wealth to keep them in a manner to which he has allowed them to become accustomed.

Director Harry Fehr has come up with a little gem with this production of Cinderella. It is a ridiculous story at the best of times, even if truth is stranger than fiction, but he has thought it out thoroughly, incorporated a wealth of neat details and delivered an evening awash with pleasure.

Do they all live happily ever after? Well, obviously Cinderella calls the shots in her romance, but if she tires of life in the palace and the posturing of her Mr D’Arcy, she can always make a career as an opera singer.

© James Munro, 2008

Links

• Scottish Opera

Essential Scottish Opera (photo - Mark Hamilton)

ESSENTIAL Scottish Opera is a tried and tested formula that sets out every year to take opera to the smaller communities throughout Scotland. Four singers and a piano, with props rather than costumes, perform a selection of known and unknown excerpts from opera and musical theatre. The concept is the same for every tour, so how can it remain fresh and appealing year after year?

One way is to bring in a fresh choice of songs each year, and Scottish Opera’s Head of Music, Derek Clark, has an encyclopaedic range to delve into and select twenty arias that has the audience saying either “I know that!” or “That’s a new one on me.” This year he even came up with a composer that was new to me, Josef Poniatovski.

A little bit of digging, and it turns out he was the great-nephew of the last King of Poland, and was in the service of Napoleon III of France who he followed into exile at Chislehurst in Kent, where he died in 1873. Whether he shared the magnificent Palladian mansion Napoleon built is unknown. At least the building is still there and in good use as the spectacular and luxurious clubhouse for Chislehurst Golf Club. But I digress.

Essential Scottish Opera changes every year by introducing four new singers, and over the years I have never been disappointed in their choice. All the same, perhaps this year the tour should have been known as Essential Aussie Opera, as three of the artists had followed the well trodden path of Dame Joan Sutherland to develop their careers in the UK.

The fourth offers a distinctly British CV, but a distinctly Scandinavian name. What was especially fresh about this year’s cast is that all four could act, as well as sing beautifully. I recall the company’s visit a few years ago when the soprano, Claire Wild, stood out as she acted her songs, whilst the other three just sang them. It showed, and Claire went on to sing Gretel in Hansel and Gretel for Scottish Opera, the part of The Cricket was written for her at Almeida Opera, and then she joined English National Opera at the Coliseum in London.

And a third source of freshness, and I use that word advisedly, is in the way that director Martin Lloyd-Evans has introduced a broad element of S. E. X. Much of the programme originated in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but if these excerpts had been performed then as they were now, there would have been much popping of monocles, twirling of moustaches and calling for smelling salts! Of that, more later.

What does stay the same as the years go by is the quality of the production and the energy and stamina of pianist Ian Shaw. He keeps everything galloping along, as he has done since the last century.

The show opened with the famous drinking song from La Traviata by Verdi, billed as a quartet, but where was the fourth member of the cast? All was revealed when tenor Blake Fischer, as Alfredo Germont, burst in from the back of the hall in full voice, stripped off his outer clothes and took to the stage with bottle and glasses in hand. It was the overture to get everyone in the right mood as the party started to swing, to the extent that Alfredo and Violetta remained in a very passionate embrace as they purported to be a tree for the second number, ‘Ombra mai fù’ from Handel’s Xerxes, sweetly sung by mezzo Catriona Barr.

Then it was a couple of Mozart numbers. The trio, ‘Pria di partir, o Dio!’ from Idomeneo, and the flirting ‘Là ci darem la mano’ from Don Giovanni sung in celebrity style with soprano Amanda Forbes as Zerlina proving that she is ready to lead the way as the non-Aussie Anders Östberg as Giovanni tried to seduce her on the morning of her wedding to Masetto.

And so it continued, as Carmen and Don Jose sang their love duet, as Gilda sang of her love for the disguised Duke in Rigoletto, as Belcore dreams of winning the love of Adina through the bottle and his body in Donizetti’s L’elisir d’amore, to the love between Poppea and Nero, sung by the two female roles, from The Coronation of Poppea by Monteverdi.

There was a brief visit to the emotions of love, rather than the physical, as Blake Fischer, as Lensky, sang of his love for Olga as he prepares to meet his former friend Eugene Onegin in a duel. Normal service was resumed for the finale to the first half with the Kissing Trio from Smetana’s The Two Widows, involving an inevitable three-in-a-bed romp!

A brief walk outside to lower the temperature was an essential, followed by a cup of tea and shortbread kindly supplied by Friends of Scottish Opera. Then it was time for the contribution of Prince Joseph Michael Xavier Francis John Poniatovski, in the shape of the ‘Audition Duet’ from his one-act burlesque Through The Wall, with Anders Östberg as the Impresario and Amanda Forbes as the Ingénue, both proving that the traditions of the Holywood casting couch were well established in nineteenth century Paris.

Offenbach offered Blake Fischer as Paris having to choose between three equally seductive goddesses, followed by the two men in the famous ‘Gendarmes’ Duet’, running them in with an accomplished opera buffa performance, complete with squeaky plastic truncheons.

All four singers were given the chance to shine with some lesser known songs, from Ambroise Thomas’s Mignon, Britten’s Billy Budd, Bernstein’s Trouble in Tahiti, Gilbert and Sullivan’s Ruddigore, Cole Porter’s Kiss Me Kate and Samuel Barber’s Vanessa. Then it was time for the finale, an unusual choice, ‘In praise of wine and love’ from Love at the Inn by Roger Quilter, beautifully sung by all four performers, and acted with the somewhat degenerate game of mixing up the room keys in a bowl, and then taking pot luck, with a twist!

It was interesting that the Beauly audience seemed to take to this little pantomime quite readily, and with not a few knowing titters! And then it got the loudest and longest applause of the evening. Maybe they know something I don’t? In Beauly!?

An encore was inevitable, and it was another of Derek Clark’s hidden gems, a nineteenth century anonymous German piece, ‘Sometimes in moonlit places’, after which a contented audience went out into the cold, checking whose keys they’d got!

© James Munro, 2008

Links

• Scottish Opera

Dmitry Ivashchenko (left) and Eberhard Lorenz in Mozart's Seraglio (photo - Marco Borggreve).

Vienna, 1782. Since the great Siege of the city a century before, an uneasy cold war has existed between the Christian West and the ‘evil empire’ of the Ottomans. But in the absence of active hostilities a fascination has grown up with all things Turkish: croissants and coffee, harems and Janissary music.

In choosing a Turkish theme for the opera which was to make his name in Vienna, Mozart was therefore following in a well-established theatrical tradition. But he wasn’t simply writing a whimsical and slightly racy fantasy: as Linda Colley’s marvellous book Captives demonstrates, thousands of Europeans had been seized by Muslims over the previous century, and so it was not that unusual to find Christian-born women held in Turkish harems.

So The Abduction from the Seraglio (to give the opera its full title) was both as up-to-date politically as John Adams’ Nixon in China, and as loaded with erotic fantasy as Valentino’s The Sheikh.

Inverness 2007. A new production of Seraglio would seem to offer an opportunity for examining current East-West relations, without doing violence to Mozart’s original concept. But the directors of this version, which originated with the Nationale Reisopera in the Netherlands, avoid almost all sense of ‘Turkishness’ as something alien or Other.

The abstract setting is both a large, blank room to which all six characters seem confined-shades of Sartre’s ‘Hell is Other People’-and a huge sandpit in which they play out their emotions with a furious, childish energy.

Costumes are generically18th century, there’s not a hint of Mediterranean sun, and the only Oriental reference, outside Mozart’s music, is an enlarged Persian miniature which flashes briefly into view when the chorus are singing.

This approach seems to pull the rug out from under the whole basis of the opera: without a clear idea of the Otherness of Pasha Selim and his servant Osmin, the crucial contrast is lost between, on the one hand, the enlightened clemency of the Pasha and, on the other, both Osmin’s stereotyped brutality, and the cruelty of the Pasha’s Christian counterpart.

But then, as a quote in the programme from Edward Said’s largely discredited Orientalism makes clear, to have emphasised the difference of the Turks would just have been to strengthen our Western prejudices about them. Welcome to the wonderful world of concept opera.

Seraglio is a singspiel-which means that there’s a lot of spoken dialogue, as opposed to sung recitative. So it does make some sense to perform the opera in English, rather than the original German. But Scottish Opera have imported this Dutch production in its entirety, including the cast, only one of whom is a native English speaker.

So we have the non-singing Pasha, speaking with a German accent, addressing the Spanish nobleman Belmonte, who replies in a French-Canadian accent, while Osmin declaims in a thick Russian accent, abusing the Spanish servant Pedrillo (who also has a German accent).

Still with me? In fact the only thing ‘Scottish’ about this Scottish Opera production is the excellent orchestra, which gives a wonderfully characterful and pointed performance under the confident and astute direction of Jeremy Carnall (also on loan from the Dutch company).

The usual argument for singing opera in English-so that the audience can understand the words-has always seemed weak to me, when it’s often hard to make out the sung words even of operas actually written in English. It gets much harder when only one of the singers has English as a first language!

Matters were not helped by David Pountney’s surprisingly maladroit translation, which failed to match consonants and syllables to the original German, thus ruining the effect of some of the best known numbers in the score, especially Osmin’s climactic triumph aria.

Mozart’s score is a fascinating mix of past, present and future. The heroine Constanze’s big aria of defiance looks back to the formal setpieces of Mozart’s teenage years, Osmin and Pedrillo have simple arias as immediate and memorable as folk songs, while the huge, complex Act II finale anticipates the wonderful architecture of his mature masterpieces.

Indeed, this must have been the part of the opera that caused the Emperor to complain of ‘Too many notes, Herr Mozart’, and it proved to be the highlight of this production. Mozart was a great tamperer with his libretti, and he made huge changes in the text of Seraglio so that it becomes the first of his humane comedies of reconciliation and forgiveness, the themes that will dominate every one of his mature operas, from The Marriage of Figaro to The Clemency of Titus.

But this production does not have the courage of Mozart’s convictions. The Pasha is made to deliver his final act of clemency and liberation grudgingly and against his own inner feelings, and he does not stay to hear the thanks of those he has spared. And as the offstage chorus praises the Pasha’s greatness, all six characters coldly resume their seats on either side of the stage, back where they began the opera.

There is no release, no way forward-huis clos-the conflicts, fears, jealousies will all have to be enacted again. Not quite what Mozart intended, but after all, he only wrote the music.

Fortunately, that music was well served. The lovers Belmonte and Constanze may have rather lacked charisma, but they rose to the challenge of their big numbers. Dimitry Ivaschenko was hampered by the production’s two-dimensional concept of Osmin, which left little room for comedy, but he is clearly a star in the making, with an imposing presence and a huge bass voice that should make him a great ‘Boris Godunov’ in the future.

Best of all was Rebecca Bottone as the sparky maid Blonde. She lit up the stage whenever she appeared, and drew the first (and rather belated) spontaneous applause of the evening. As I’ve already said, the orchestral accompaniment-complete with natural trumpets and hard, dry timpani-was excellent throughout.

Seraglio raises some interesting questions about Scottish Opera’s ways of working. It’s hard to see how the introduction of this Dutch production, the entire cast and even the conductor, is any different from the kind of touring visits which foreign opera companies make to the Edinburgh Festival, which are also often accompanied by Scottish orchestras.

It certainly seems to do little to build up any kind of Scottish ensemble company such as existed in Scottish Opera’s heyday. And when the result of bringing in what is, in effect, a ‘guest’ company is a production that is so often misguided, and at times-as lighting levels fluctuate madly, and singers career frantically around the stage rather than just staying in one place and singing-downright clumsy, one has to wonder about the company’s underlying policies.

Saturday’s performance had an added element of drama, in that a persistent background noise during Constanze’s big number turned out, once we’d all finished applauding, to be the fire alarm. Assuming it was the interval, many of the audience stayed put in the auditorium, until they were finally ushered out to shiver in the car park. Fortunately it was indeed a false alarm: just another teething problem for the new complex!

© Robert Livingston, 2007

Links

• Scottish Opera
• Eden Court Theatre

Left to right - Thomas Oliemans, Adrian Dwyer, Karin Thyselius, Karen Cargill and Nicholas Folwell (photo Tas Kyprianou)

YOU MAY not think you like opera. You may think it is only for the poncy and the rich. Think again. In the interval of Rossini’s “Il barbiere di Siviglia”, I struck up a conversation with two Invernessian ladies, the elder of whom was a sprightly 91; this was their first ever experience of opera and they were loving every minute of it. So much so, they were already planning to come back and see more.

Just one example of how Scottish Opera is triumphantly succeeding in its mission to demystify opera, strip off the elitist tag and take it to new audiences everywhere. Their productions combine musical excellence with fun, zip, verve, brio, elan – call it what you will, it is evident from the first note that this is a company which loves what it does and, crucially, wants to share that enjoyment with their audience.

In other words, it’s high culture but it’s also great craic, demonstrating why Scotland, and the world, needs this particular, Scottish, opera company.

To achieve this, Sir Thomas Allen, opera star turned director, had chosen his singers well; not only were their voices terrific, but they could all act individually and, crucially, in ensemble; without this opera can, and too often does, turn into a succession of cardboard cutouts with audio effects.

Arbroath-born Karen Cargill, as heroine Rosina, is gifted with one of the loveliest voices you could ever hope to hear, warm and true, with a clear coloratura which paired well with the equally clear, unstrained tenor of Australian Adrian Dwyer, playing her suitor Count Almaviva.

If you don’t know the story, the Count’s attempts to woo Rosina are alternately frustrated by her guardian Dr Bartolo (Nicholas Folwell), who wants to marry her himself, and aided by the eponymous Figaro (Dutch singer Thomas Oliemans, making his UK operatic debut).

Some productions render this as panto or farce, but Allen’s more naturalistic, believable treatment worked brilliantly. Sung in the original Italian, the twists and turns of the plot were elucidated by surtitles and the expressive acting.

The staging was masterful, particularly in the big closing numbers to each act, where the chorus flung themselves into chairs, climbed on tables, draped themselves on the balcony staircase, stood on stilts or even began to juggle, to create a gloriously animated three dimensional tableau.

Throughtout the evening countless playful touches -  including a nun bicycling across the stage – were thrown artfully into the mix until the show resembled a big, rich, plum pudding, a delicious pre-Christmas treat for the Highlands; the audience polished off every crumb and applauded till their arms could take no more.

This was my first outing to the newly refurbished Eden Court – it is a triumph both front of house and behind the curtain, a building which now welcomes audience and performers alike. The main auditorium, never my favourite space, felt warmer, curvier, more comfortable, and the stage seemed much less remote.

It would be hard to find a better production than “Il barbiere” to illustrate exactly why the refurbishment represents money well spent.

Having enjoyed some of the stripped down productions that Scottish Opera and Eden Court in Exile have managed valiantly to tour round small Highland venues these past two years, it was a revelation to see the real thing with all the trimmings – everything from a full chorus and a beautifully designed set (Simon Higlett) with scenery disappearing into the flies to a proper orchestra and conductor (Derek Clark) in the orchestra pit.

Eden Court’s fancy new lighting rig was put through its paces by some wonderfully atmospheric designs by Mark Jonathan. It’s a cause for major celebration that at long last audiences in the Highlands will not have to make the long trek south to experience artistic productions at the very highest international standard

And “Il barbiere” was emphatically of that standard. If it is important for Scotland to win Olympic gold medals, it must be just as important for her to be represented by top quality national arts companies.

Let us hope that Minister for Culture Linda Fabiani will put her money where her mouth was in her address to the Scottish Parliament last week (see link below) and give Scottish opera enough funding to make redundant the eight pages of the programme thanking private donors for their essential help in funding the current season. Scotland deserves a properly funded Scottish Opera  – because we’re worth it.

(Scottish Opera perform Il barbiere di Siviglia again on 16 November at Eden Court, and Mozart’s Seraglio on 17 November)

© Jennie Macfie, 2007

Links

• Eden Court Theatre
• Scottish Opera
• Linda Fabiani’s address on Creative Scotland and Cultural Policy (scroll down document)

Die Fledermaus

DIE FLEDERMAUS is not a nice operetta. Without exception its characters are selfish, amoral and lustful, drinking like fish, and cheerfully manipulating and betraying each other without a hint of remorse.

Now, all this ghastly behaviour is usually cloaked, in conventional productions, by the apparatus of opera capes, ballgowns, champagne flutes, and echt Viennese settings at the height of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, while Johann Strauss II’s music fizzes and sparkles like the bubbly it celebrates.

But Scottish Opera’s new small-scale touring production by Lee Blakeley reveals the skull beneath the skin, with a setting that is not just contemporary but very close to home—the dubiously affluent, thoroughly tasteless, pleasure-seeking, clubbing class of Glasgow—or any other major UK city today.

Attempts to update ‘Die Fledermaus’ have not always been successful: Powell and Pressburger’s status as Britain’s greatest filmmakers took a knock with ‘Oh! Rosalinda’, which adopted a contemporary setting in post-war Vienna, under the control of the Four Powers.

But that film couldn’t resist keeping in the air of whimsy and schlagobers—whipped cream—which the rest of the world associates with Strauss and Vienna.

Scottish Opera go for the jugular with no concessions to sentiment or nostalgia. If that sounds bleak, then worry not—the energy, brio, and sheer fecundity of comic invention on display make for a thumping good night out.

The witty dumb-show during the overture sets the scene immediately—these are a shallow, self-gratifying bunch. And when the action proper gets going, Giles Havergal’s sharp translation (plus a few up to the minute additions) keeps the action moving at a cracking pace.

Act Two could have been a problem—how do you stage a lavish party with only eight performers and no chorus? Easy—keep the main party offstage and restrict all the action to the foyer—which quickly comes to resemble the ante-chamber to hell of Sartre’s ‘Huis Clos’.

For this bunch hell is definitely other people! Even Strauss’s schmaltzy hymn to ‘matinees’—‘Brüderlein und Schwesterlein’ is undercut by being delivered as a mass karaoke number.

The third act in the prison often seems an anti-climax after the glitter of the party but in this production it seems an entirely logical continuation. There’s no happy resolution: Falke’s ‘vengeance of the bat’ has turned sour, Eisenstein still has to spend his eight days in jail, Rosalinde is disappointed in all her men, and the Russian billionare Orlofksy is still bored.

That final apostrophe to the powers of champagne has never sounded more hollow.

A uniformly talented cast are equally skilled as singers and actors—and indeed dancers, thanks to some astute choreography–though Highland loyalties insist that I single out Inverness girl Kate Valentine who shows real star quality as Rosalinde.

The real hero of the evening was music director Oliver Rundell, whose sparkling pianism kept up the drive and momentum throughout the whole evening.

Thanks to special efforts by the Eden Court team as well as Scottish Opera technicians, the Strathpeffer Pavilion was turned into an acceptable theatre for the evening, although not many of the capacity house can have had as clear a view of the action as your reviewer, who had the unfair benefit of some raised seating!

The tour still has four further Highlands and Islands dates in October—beg, buy or steal a ticket!

(Die Fledermaus can be seen at the Village Hall, Lochinver, 14 October; Craigmonie Centre, Drumnadrochit, 17 October; Arainn Shuaineirt, Strontian, 19 October; and the Village Hall, Whiting Bay, Arran, on 28 October).

© Robert Livingston, 2006

Links

• Scottish Opera

SCOTTISH OPERA FOR ALL have earned an enviable reputation for their educational and outreach work on behalf of Scottish Opera. The Minotaur was the subject of a huge schools’ project earlier this year, but has also brought the chance to mount their first full-scale main stage production under the Opera For All banner, using professional singers with music and a libretto (by Allan Dunn) written from scratch for the project.

The claim that The Minotaur offered all the attractions of full opera on a reduced scale was largely borne out in the production, and the only thing really lacking was genuine dramatic tension in the storytelling.

It did have arias, duets, trios and choruses, and made effective use of the small orchestra of seven musicians in delivering Julian Evans’ score. The music was heavily influenced by Minimalism (in the John Adams manner) and French Impressionism, the later most notably in the rather erotically charged scene when Theseus confronts the Minotaur at the heart of the Labyrinth.

With the exception of Paul Keohone as Theseus, all of the cast – Adele Mason, Claire Wilde, Louise Innes, Colin Judson, Nicholas Fowler, Sarah Rhodes and dancer David Hughes – took on multiple roles in the action. The live drama was supported by some clever animation, including something of a tour de force as Theseus flew through the Labyrinth in best PlayStation fashion.

The Minotaur provided a colourful introduction to operatic mores for a young audience, and offered enough of interest to hold the attention of adults as well.

The Minotaur can be seen at Eden Court Theatre, Inverness, from 17-19 June 2004.

© Kenny Mathieson, 2004

Scottish Opera’s production of La bohème

IF BELEAGUERED  Scottish Opera are still hoping to persuade politicians of the company’s real merits, then this new production makes an ideal calling card. Vivid, gripping, accessible and imaginative, it has all the hallmarks of a company working at the top of its form. Certainly, by comparison with Scottish Opera’s last Puccini offering in Inverness, a dowdy production of Madame Butterfly, indifferently performed, this might have been a different company altogether.

As opera-goers of a conservative disposition will already be aware, this is an ‘updated’ production, where the Bohemians’ garret has become a SoHo loft, Café Momus turns into New York’s MOMA, Marcello is a video artist, and Rodolfo writes magazine articles and film scripts.

But the wary should remember that there are two very different kinds of updating. In the first the producer uses the opera’s libretto as little more than a framework on which to hang his or her own personal or political obsessions.  In the second, the updating presents the opera in a sharper focus, its meanings teased out and its emotions clarified.

Director/designer Stewart Laing definitely belongs to this second school.  Last year, his stunning Tosca for Umeå Opera, in northern Sweden, transferred the action to a present-day Latin American state in the grip of a right wing theocracy. Revolution, torture, corruption and sacrifice took an a terrifying immediacy.

His new version of La Bohème is not so radical—after all the musical Rent has already moved the opera into a similar milieu—but it has the same effect of restoring a much loved Old Master—years of varnish and grime have been removed to reveal the harsher, brighter, truer colours of the original.

Laing also has a canny sense for coups de theâtre, and there are a number of moments in this production which produce gasps of delight from the audience. These are never used simply for effect, however, but to heighten the impact of the storyline and delineate characters more clearly.  The surtitles update the original libretto with considerable wit, but such is the clarity of the staging that for much of the time they’re hardly necessary.

Of course, all of this would mean little if the performance was weak.  Fortunately, this production is blessed with a uniformly strong cast.  Peter Auty and Rachel Hynes as Rodolfo and Mimi may not have the largest of voices, but in a smaller theatre like Eden Court they sound just right, and they bring considerable sensitivity and musicality to their roles.

I can’t remember ever seeing Rodolfo’s fellow artists being so strongly characterised and differentiated, and Musetta’s transitions from lush through tramp to anxious friend are beautifully caught by Rebecca von Lipinksi.  It says something for the strength of opera in Britain today that all but one of the young cast are native-born and trained.  Standing in for an indisposed Richard Farnes, Scottish Opera’s chorusmaster Piers Maxim showed an unerring feel for the natural ebb and flow of Puccini’s music, and drew some beautiful playing from the Scottish Opera orchestra.

The Anglo-Saxon world is often too ready to confuse sentiment with sentimentality.  This La Bohème shows just how Puccini cuts through to the essence of our emotions with the precision of a master surgeon. Mimi’s Act 4 death scene is possibly the most famous tear-jerker in opera, but in this production it is the absolute reality of death, loss, and regret for things left unsaid and undone, which leaves not a dry eye in the house.

If this is what Scottish Opera at its best can achieve—a theatrical experience that is direct, moving and (yes) relevant—then what does it say about the confidence of a devolved Scotland if we can’t afford to sustain such work?

La Bohème is at the Edinburgh Festival Theatre on 15, 17, 19 June 2004 (matinee), 22, 24 and 26 June 2004.

© Robert Livingston, 2004

WHILE SCOTTISH OPERA GO ROUND takes slimmed-down versions of full scale operas to smaller venues around the country (Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin visits Elgin in April), the Essential Scottish Opera package aims at halls even less frequented by opera, and does so on a different basis. They have piano accompaniment in common, but the Essential package features excerpts from a whole range of operatic (and operetta) material.

The formula is straight-forward enough: pack up four aspiring young professional singers, a pianist, a handful of props and a diverse selection of music into a minibus and send them off around the country (this tour ranges from Stranraer to Kirkwall). It is a tried and tested formula, and continues to work very effectively. If Kingussie is at all typical, it also remains very popular with audiences.

This year’s crop of young singers did not include a tenor, which left Daniel Jordan’s sonorous, well-rounded bass-baritone as the only male voice among the singers. Elizabeth Cragg had the more classically pure voice of the two sopranos, and was notably secure in the highest ranges, while Adele Mason’s slightly fuller sonority made for an appealing contrast in the soprano material. Mezzo-soprano Karen Cargill completed the vocal line-up, and impressed in her own right as well as providing an effective foil in the various duets, trios and quartets.

The format of the show does allow them to be wide-ranging in their selection of material, and provides the audience with a whirlwind romp through virtually the full range of opera, from Handel to Britten, and most if not all points between. Popular operas like Mozart’s Don Giovanni and Cosi fan Tutti, Strauss’s Die Fledermaus and Bizet’s Carmen were represented, but not always by the most obvious pieces.

Elsewhere, items like ‘Aleko’s Cavatina’ from Rachmaninov’s Aleko or the ‘Waltz Song’ by the Soviet composer Dmitry Kabelevsky pulled in less obvious fare. The fast interchange of comic and tragic pieces generally worked well, and struck no incongruous notes, while the light hearted closing sequence in which the popular ‘In Solitude and Sighing’ from Die Fledermaus was followed by ‘Three Little Maids from School’ from The Mikado sent everyone home in good mood (they did a hilarious encore as well, which I won’t spoil by giving it away).

It is arguably more difficult to get the more serious or tragic excerpts across in this format, but Elizabeth Cragg did a fine job as the imprisoned Cleopatra in an aria from Handel’s Giulio Cesare, as did Adele Mason as the dying Violetta in a scene from La Traviata, while Jordan and Cargill combined effectively in both the aria from Aleko and ‘Within this frail crucible of light’ from Britten’s The Rape of Lucretia.

Pianist Ian Shaw, a veteran of five of these tours (and some Opera Go Rounds besides) produced his usual heroic work on a piano that did him few favours. The minimal props and sets were imaginatively used and recycled, and it all added up to a grand taste of opera in miniature.

Essential Scottish Opera’s remaining performances in the Highland and Islands are:
Pickaquoy Centre, Kirkwall, Orkney, Tuesday 2 March 2004
Community Hall, Ardross, Thursday 4 March 2004
Universal Hall, Findhorn, Saturday 6 March 2004
Village Hall, Ballachulish, Monday 8 March 2004
Macphail Theatre, Ullapool, Monday 15 March 2004
High School, Thurso, Tuesday 16 March 2004

© Kenny Mathieson, 2004

MOZART, in da Opera house! To see an audience helpless with laughter during a night at the opera is an unusual occurrence, but this was the achievement of Scottish Opera’s production of Mozart’s The Magic Flute which visited Eden Court recently.

This opera, or rather Singspiel, the 18th-century equivalent of a musical, is a curious blend of Masonic symbolism and knock-about comedy, and modern directors are faced with a number of problems when producing the work. The brilliant solution arrived at by director Jonathan Moore was to use an aggressively up-dated translation by Kit Hesketh-Harvey to set the piece in a contemporary context.

The nowadays rather obscure Masonic elements are transformed into allusions to The Matrix, while the cult of Isis and Osiris, becomes the Isis and Osiris Mission, a sort of ritualistic space programme. This permits what has to be the most arresting opening image of any Scottish Opera production to date, an astronaut in full space-walk gear floating slowly across a lunar landscape.

Comedy is notoriously difficult to update successfully, but Hesketh-Harvey’s witty, urbane and elegant translation simply bristles with contemporary popular resonances from Ali G. and Red Dwarf to Morcambe and Wise and Acorn Antiques. The Three Boys in baggy gear and baseball caps, engaging in stylised drive-by gesturing in the manner of an LA gang was just one part of a constant stream of allusion, in which libretto and production appealed directly to the audience’s experience in the same way as Schikaneder’s 1791 production would undoubtedly have done.

Resurrecting opera from the safe obscurity of a foreign tongue and a long-dead context places considerable demands upon the performers, who are called on to deliver a daunting range of acting skills. Roland Wood’s memorable portrayal of the comic bird-catcher Papageno involved comic xylophone playing and stand-up comedy with a bawdy edge, which had the audience in stitches, while his avine partner Papagena was beautifully played by Benedikte Moes.

The two enigmatically symbolic trio ensembles, the Three Boys and Three Ladies, the classical precursors of Wagner’s Rhine Maidens and Norns, were perfectly gauged to fulfil their comic and serious functions in the drama. The excellent Mark Wilde and Gail Pearson were a versatile and vocally impressive Pamino and Tamina, who moved with consummate ease between the comic and the tragic.

Jennifer Rhys-Davis’s intense Queen of the Night and Tim Mirfin’s towering Sarastro added considerable gravitas to the serious threads of the opera, and if this darker misogynistic dimension of the piece was slightly less well served by the translation which sometimes in this context sounded just a little glib, powerful direction and the austerely beautiful set helped to restore the balance.

As ever, the Orchestra of Scottish Opera under the dynamic baton of Vincent de Kort made a superbly musical contribution, with Ruari Donaldson’s military sounding Baroque timpani adding a powerful edge to the sound. If you missed this witty and thought-provoking production, I strongly recommend you check it out when it returns to Edinburgh in January 2004. It is enormously encouraging to see an opera company which could have been forgiven for resting on its laurels after its summertime coup with Wagner’s Ring triumphantly taking on such a challenge. Big it up for Scottish Opera! respec’.

© D James Ross, 2003